John Delcos enters his third season covering the Mets for The Journal News after eight seasons on the Yankees beat. Prior to coming to New York, John covered the Baltimore Orioles, Cleveland Browns and Cleveland Indians.

I think Perez would have started had the mets not been on a hot streak of late and opening up more of a lead in the NL East. That’s just Willie’s style of managing.

If you recall from last year, that was exactly how Oliver Perez himself was able to crack into the starting rotation, by Willie giving him a shot when the mets were already far out in front of the Phillies, where he didn’t really have much to lose.

Its also an interesting type of matchup. Could Willie be worried about Ollie’s flyball tendancies? I suppose Pelfrey would certainly be a nice counter to that, but only if he’s found his sinker in NO. But you’d also think Willie would like matching Ollie up against the twin killers of Utley and Howard for the Phillies.

People need to give Pelfrey a break. Too many Mets fans are unreasonably impatient with their prospects when they don’t come up and immediately look like the second coming of Darryl Strawberry or Dwight Gooden. Pelfrey was rushed from college into the bigs by Willomar with out the necessary skill set to succeed at the ML level. IMO, whatever issues he is having is more management’s fault for not allowing him to learn the necessary pitches to compliment his one ML level pitch—the 95mph sinking fastball.

Right now the kid is basically learning to pitch all over again with two new added pitches in his repetoire. He has to hone a slider he learned in the past offseason during Winterball and experiment with new grips for his circle changeup so that it fades slower. So, of course he is having problems. Show some faith and give him an opportunity to work these things out over a few months without the scrutiny so that he may learn how to locate all his pitches for strikes. When he does learn to do this, you will see that the strikeouts will increase as he will be able to offer a greater variety of pitching locations, speeds, and trajectories.

BMC, the most alarming aspect of his game is his inability to spot his offspeed stuff. Pelfrey has decent enough command of the fastball, but it really doesn’t matter where he places it if ML hitters are going to sit on the pitch and spit on the slider and change everytime. Being able to throw 95 mph means nothing if you cannot offer hitters a different look to keep them honest.

Take el Duque for example, last year in 2006 he almost averaged 164 K for 162 innings pitched! Now, that is more than one strkiout per inning from a 40 something pitcher who throws 91-92 mph on his best day. There are many days where Hernandez does not have command of his fastball and he still manages to get hitters to swing and miss because he can vary speeds to about 30 mph slower than his fastball with his many offspeed pitches (change, curveball, slider).

Because el Duque has the ability to offer different pitch trajectories, speeds, and locations he is a strkiout pitcher. Once Pelfrey learns to do this more effectively he will improve in this respect.

THE DIVISION WINNERS AND THE WILD CARD TEAM..2007
EAST…METS BY 8 OVER PHILADELPHIA
CENTRAL..MILWAUKEE BY 12 OVER ST.LOUIS
WEST…SAN DIEGO BY 3 OVER L.A
WILD CARD…..PHILADELPHIA
THE METS?..WORLD SERIES….